Fong Kai FK330 mid tower case

Nov 16, 2003 by Russ Kinder

Product	Fong Kai FK330 mid-tower case
Manufacturer	Fong Kai Industrial Co. Sample provided by the US office
Price	US$139 at Directron.com – The only North American retail distributor of Fong Kai that we could find at time of publication.

You may never heard of Fong Kai. But you’ve definitely seen their cases. Fong Kai is a big name in the OEM market, having been one of the major suppliers to the likes of HP, and they are beginning to establish name recognition in their own right.

Actually, a few years ago, Anand’s
Hardware (as they were known then) took a real shine to the Fong Kai FK-603
and FK-320A cases, both of which are still available, according to the Fong
Kai web site. (They do look a bit dated by current standards.) That exposure
probably helped raise the company’s profile with enthusiasts.

The company’s newest offering, the FK-330, is described as a “Medium Tower Workstation Class.” Its look is as modern as any case I’ve seen.

The exterior of the FK-330 can be summed up in two words: “Simple Elegance”.
Nothing flashy, no doors, no windows. Just basic matt black and silver. The
paint finish is very good, a step above most case paint jobs, better than
the Antec
SLK3700BQE. The black with silver bezel and stripe lends an understated
yet classy touch and allows it to look good with either black or silver optical
drives. (Silver faced components can be had from numerous vendors. Directron,
for example, will custom paint any drive for $8.)

Fong Kai’s complete details on the FK-330:

Features Workstation class mid-tower – Supports EATX and ATX. Single or Multi-Processor Motherboards. Up to 3x 3.5 HDD with 1x FDD/HDD Combo Bay. Dual Xeon approved with space for several additional components, and easy installation of components. 120mm and 92mm Dual Fan Cooling System – Excellent thermal properties multiple configurations. One hand operation of Tooless / Screwless Side panel – Quick easy access. Easy in HDD drive cage -3.5″ Easy in Tooless / Screwless Drive mounting system of Hard Disk Drives (Pat. Pending.) Quick Mount 3x 5.25 drive cage – Tooless / Screwless Drive mounting system of Optical Disk Drives 5.25″ devices mount with or without drive rails. Pat. Pending. Reinforced motherboard plate – eliminates chassis flex during shipment. Tooless / Screwless Expansion slot card installation – Pat. Pending. AGP/PCI Card Retention system for expansion slots. Pat. Pending. Front Connectivity including USB2.0, IEEE1394, and Audio Chassis Dimensions Height – 17.50″ (internal – 15.75″) Depth – 19.75″ (internal – 17.75″) Width – 8.25″ (internal – 7.50″)

The dimensions put it solidly in the mid-tower class, except for depth: The FK-330 is a good 2″ deeper than the 18″ or so typical of most mid-towers. Although the weight is not given, on an ordinary bathroom scale, it measured a very considerable 32 lbs with the supplied power supply. Take away ~4 lbs for the PSU, and you have a case that weights around 28 lbs or nearly 13 kg. Compare that to the Chenbro Gaming Bomb at ~8kg or the Antec SLK3700 at ~9kg. This is no lightweight.

THE EXTERIOR

Front

There are three exposed 5.25″ bays, and one exposed 3.5″ bay. A
nice touch is that the 3.5″ bay cover doesn’t look like a cover at all,
which is nice if you’re like me and have abandoned the floppy drive altogether.
As you can see, the silver fronted optical drive looks right at home.

The bottom half of the bezel is dominated by a huge area of aluminum mesh, broken only by the port for the front mounted USB 2.0, audio, and firewire connectors.

The ports are covered by a little door, which happens to be the one weak
point about the front bezel. Well, actually, the door is fine, I like having
a door to keep dust out of the ports, the latch is the issue. It appears to
have a serious aversion to remaining closed. The slightest jiggle of the case
and the door flops back open. For a case where the rest of the design is so
well thought-out, this latch is entirely too wimpy. I ended up just popping
the door completely off.

Back

The first thing that stands out when looking at the rear of the FK-330 is
the 120mm fan opening. The grill itself is composed of stamped circular holes,
with very narrow spaces in between them. It’s one of the best stamped fan
grills I’ve seen on a case. Some people may choose to cut it out, but that’s
not likely to give any cooling or noise advantage because it is already so
open. (Editor’s Note: The grill holes are smaller than in
the Antec Sonata or SLK3700BQE, but overall openness appears the same.)

One thing I noticed is the lack of standard screws holding the sides on the
case on. The right side has no screws showing on the back plane at all, and
the ones on the left are odd little torx/slot combinations. Why the left side
doesn’t show screws we’ll get to shortly. The use of nonstandard screws on
the left demonstrates Fong Kai’s design intention that the left panel does
not need to be removed for most installations. That is due to their nearly
tool-less interior design, which we will also get to shortly.

NOTE: At least one online reviewer has complained about the right
side being non-removable. It is removable, and pretty easily
at that. The trick is that it has to be pulled upwards after the screws are
removed, not backwards as with most case sides. (I have a hilarious mental
image of some reviewer, case clutched between his knees, pulling backwards
with all his might, trying to get the side off.) The right panel on mine has
been off more than once, with no grunting or swearing required.

Removable Left Panel

And now, one of my favorite parts of the whole case: The Door. The left side is latched at the top, with the handle recessed into the panel itself. Lifting the handle causes the panel to come free, and it can either pivot from the bottom, or you can lift it clear.

Image deliberately lightened with Photoshop so you can see the detail.

The mechanism is a bar latch that extends the whole width of the panel and
engages at four points It works easily, smoothly and securely. It feels more
like the latch for a piece of quality cabinetry or industrial equipment than
for a computer case. (Editor’s aside: Jeff of FKI USA says that
the inspiration for this latch and door design came from the likes of luxury
cars like the Lexus, so Russ is not far off.)

Part the of reason for the solidity of the latch, as well as the case’s general
heft, can seen on the inside of the removable panel. Rather than being a single
sheet of steel, the panel is reinforced by the addition of another layer of
steel welded to it on the inside, as shown below. This also acts as a mass
dampener, reducing the possibility of panel resonance. (Note to Fong-Kai:
The designers responsible for this latch should have a go at revising the
latch on the front bezel ports cover!)

INTERIOR

Intake Airflow Path

One of my most important criteria for cases is airflow. Airflow
has to start at the intake, so we’ll start there. We’ve already seen the expanse
of mesh on the outside of the front bezel of the FK-330, but lets follow the
air path to see if the openness carries through the rest of the box. One nice
touch is that Fong Kai has made the front bezel easily removable, via three
clearly marked tabs. Just lift them up and the bezel swings open to the right
and off.

With the bezel off we can get a better look at it as a discrete component:

Ladies and Gentlemen, this is how a front bezel should be designed!
The grill is open and unobstructed. It’s about as open as it can be while
still keeping your cat from crawling inside. It also provides a nice flat
intake area to mount a filter to, should that be of interest to you. (It should
be noted that no filter is included, nor is there an option for one.)

The openness continues past the front bezel and into the chassis. A very good thing; after all, what would the point be of having a bezel that open be if the air couldn’t get into the actual case?

A PC speaker comes mounted into the hexagon shaped area on the lower left.
Seeing how a speaker there blocks some of the intake, and because it isredundant
with most motherboard nowadays coming equipped with them onboard, it was removed.
It comes out very easily without tools.

Drive Cages

Here’s where we really start to see the Fong-Kai tool-less philosophy being
carried through. The optical drives are secured by 4 small pins that protrude
from the sides of each bay. Pulling on the green tab flexes the steel sheet
that the pins are attached to, withdrawing them into the sides of the rack
and allowing the drives to be slid in from the front. Pulling the handle on
this side causes both sets of pins, on both the left and the right sides of
the bay to retract simultaneously, so there’s no need to access the left side
of the case to install or remove the drives. A nifty piece of engineering,
it uses only the one sheet of steel, with none of the assorted springs or
clamps needed by other tool-less mounting systems.

Once in place the drives are rigidly secure, but like most other tool-less
mounts, there is no way to fine tune the placement of the drives to get their
faceplates to align perfectly. (Something for obsessive-compulsives to be
aware of.)

Near the top you will also see the switch for the intrusion alarm. It’s a bit of a rarity to see one of those on a consumer case these days. Combine that with the cam lock on the latch and the padlock hasp on the rear and you’ve got yourself one seriously secure computer.

Moving down the front of the case we come to the HDD racks. This rack has
something in common with the HDD racks we’ve seen in two Antec cases
recently reviewed here, the Sonata and the SLK3700BQE:
The drives are mounted sideways. A .

The rails that mount to the sides of the hard drive are a combination of
a steel spring and a plastic holder, with 3 pins to secure each side to the
drive. To attach the rail to the drive you flex it slightly, until the hook-like
pins engage with screw holes in the drive. The spring in the rail remains
slightly flexed, providing a firm fit inside the rack when inserted. Once
the drive/rail assembly is fully inserted inside the rack the rails engage
a positive lock on the rack sides to ensure a secure fit.

Close-ups of the drive rails: And my thumb makes its Internet debut.

Based on my experience with the FK-330 this mounting mechanism provides a limited amount of decoupling for the HDD. Since the HDD is only touching the plastic rails and the steel springs, some isolation is provided, although not to the same extent as a complete suspension, obviously. It may be difficult to fit any kind of true decoupling scheme for the drive here because of the tight space.

There is space below the HDD rack for the mounting of a 92mm fan. Rather
than being mounted in the traditional way there is a “funnel”, for
lack of a better word, that the fan is slid into. It should be noted that
this fan mounts below the hard drives, and they will not be directly cooled
by its airflow. According to Fong Kai this mounting design was chosen for
several reasons:

1: The funnel allows a 92mm fan to be mounted there without tools, while at the same time not being obstructed by the front ports.
2: Putting the fan lower in the case provides better cooling for the AGP/PCI portion of the motherboard.
3: With the open airflow of the front bezel, the HDDs don’t need spot cooling.

We’ll test their reasoning once the case is fully assembled.

The green plastic ladder directly under the HDD rack is a support for full length PCI/AGP cards. A definite rarity in consumer PC’s these days that demonstrates the workstation roots of the FK-330.

You can also see the white plastic cable organizer mounted on the bottom front of the case. It’s a nice touch, and really does help keep all the wires coming from the bezel down and out of the way.

Editor’s Note (by Mike Chin): In cases where the HDD drive
cage extends all the way down to the bottom, hard drive decoupled mounting
is difficult to achieve without resorting to the optical drive bays, where
the airflow is never as good as in the front bottom area. And the tight frameless
mounting of the HDDs in the FK-330 means there no way to use a real acoustic
insulator like sorbothane, in the 3.5″ drive bays. But it’s true that
hard drive suspension is one of my pet silencing obsessions, one not everyone
shares. Also, for someone determined to do HDD decoupled mounting AND get
great cooling with that excellent front intake vent, the lower “ladder”
below the HDD mount looks like it comes off with the removal of just four
pop rivets.

Motherboard Installation

The motherboard area also has some unique features. The non-removable tray
has a reinforcing panel with 4 standoffs that correspond to the heatsink mounting
holes on P4 motherboards. The plate serves to stiffen the motherboard when
a heavy heatsink has been attached. Since I don’t own a P4 motherboard, and
the standoffs don’t align with anything on a socket A board, I removed the
stiffener plate. Two screws hold it on.

Immediately upon beginning the process of installing the motherboard you’ll notice the other interesting feature in this area: The standoffs. Or lack thereof. The 330 uses only one normal screwed standoff, on the far right side of the board. The rest of the mounting holes are filled with plastic standoffs that push through the motherboard’s mounting holes and then get clipped onto the tray.

Once you understand what’s going on the process is pretty simple:

1. Fill all the mounting holes on the motherboard with the plastic standoffs,
except for the hole on the center right. That hole you leave empty for the
one standard screw-type standoff, which you install into the corresponding
hole on tray as you would in a normal case.

2. Align the motherboard with the square openings on the tray. Once aligned, you slide it to the left, and the standoffs engage in their slots with a reassuring click.

3. A single screw into the one remaining hole provides the final bit of security.

Although I’m sure some people will be made nervous by only using one screw
to install their motherboard, this is very secure, very fast, and really pretty
slick. As I am always swapping motherboards about, I wish all cases would
adopt a system like this.

I tested this mounting system with 4 different motherboards, ranging from
old M-ATX to brand new ATX, and had no trouble. A problem could arise if your
motherboard does not have the hole in the one spot where the screw standoff
must go. Without this screw, the board could pop loose when you shove connectors
in from the rear.

At one point, I intentionally left the screw off and attached all the connectors.
The board did not move. But the possibility definitely exists. It’s also noteworthy
that if your motherboard doesn’t have a screwhole in that location, it does
not technically meet the EATX, ATX, or Full AT motherboard form factor standards,
which Fong Kai depends on to meet its compatibility promise.

Rear Panel

Continuing the theme, the rear 120mm fan also has a tool-less mounting system.
The black plastic cage snaps open, and has internal pins to friction-fit a
120mm fan. But considering that the chassis also has conventional mounting
holes, and the fact that I generally dislike extraneous fan grills, I just
discarded it and mounted the 120mm L1A conventionally. There are no mounting
holes for smaller size fans, although the grill holes are perfectly good for
that purpose.

Following “tool-less-ness” to its logical conclusion, Fong Kai
has also made the securing of the PCI and AGP cards a barehanded affair. The
cards are locked in place by a pivoting mechanism, which is raised up out
of the way for installation, then locked down to secure. Although not the
first tool-less card holder I’ve seen, it is one of the better thought-out
ones. With most, unlocking the mechanism will let the cards shift, so you
end up needing to sprout extra hands to hold all the cards in the proper alignment
as you re-lock the mechanism. The Fong Kai system keeps the cards in place
even when unlocked. Although this system did work well with nonstandard back
planes, such as with the Arctic
Cooling VGA Silencer, it did not work with a Zalman
fan bracket.

Visible just to the left of the AGP/PCI slots is the mounting point for tension
arm that helps support large and heavy AGP and PCI cards. For heavy cooling
apparatus on VGA cards, such as the Zalman heatpipe, this is a useful thing.
Here are some photos that illustrate how the tension device works.

FK-330 IN OPERATION & CONCLUSIONS

So we’ve seen the features, and they are plentiful and nice, but do they perform as advertised? Only one way to find out. Here’s a complete system I installed to test the case. It’s not quite up to Ralf Hutter’s neatness standard, but it’s not bad.

Well I’m no Ralf, but it’s not bad.

Test System components:

* ABIT NF7 motherboard, with latest BIOS revisions. Modified with passively cooled NB.
* AMD XP2100+ Thoroughbred B, at stock speed and voltage (1.65v, 62.1 Watts max)
* 1GB of PC2100 RAM.
* ATI 9500 graphics card, cooled with Arctic Cooling VGA Silencer.
* Seagate Barracuda IV hard drive.
* Pioneer DVD-Rom drive
* 300W Fortron Aurora PSU, with fan control set to minimum speed.
* Panaflo 120mm L1A fan @ 5v
* CPU temperatures read from the internal thermal diode with Motherboard Monitor 5
* Ambient temperature was 22°C

NOTE: The FK-330 ships with a Delta 320W power supply. This
is a value workhorse PSU, and is nowhere near quiet enough in a stock form
to be used in a silent PC. To make the testing relevant to how most of our
readers will use this case, 300W
Fortron Aurora PSU was substituted.

Idle temps were determined by starting the machine from cold and allowing
the temps to come to a stable point. Load temperatures were generated by 60
minutes of simultaneous CPUBurn and disk defragmentation.

Temps	Idle	Load
Case	25°C	29°C
HDD	31°C	37°C
CPU	32°C	40°C

It’s pretty clear from the numbers that this case breathes very
well. The lack of spot cooling for the HDD turned out to be
a total non-issue. Perhaps if you were running a stack of hard drives the
temps would be higher, but I think that having an intake this free and open
really pays off.

Initially I had some concerns that the front bezel would allow extra noise out the front, but this proved not to be a problem. Although there would be more noise if you were running a louder HDD or an intake fan, overall the noise from the case was very subdued. I couldn’t detect any rattle or vibrations during use, even when the DVD drive was spinning. The side panels exhibited a remarkable lack of resonance, as tested by the highly technical “palm of the hand” test. This can probably be credited to the dual layers of steel on the top and right side.

All in all, the FK-330 is an excellent choice for just about anyone looking for a high quality mid-tower case.

PROS

– Simple elegant style
–
Rock-solid construction
– Free flowing air intake/exhaust path
– 120mm fan exhaust capability

– The best-ever side panel latch
– Nearly tool-less component installation
– No sharp edges
– Roomy interior

CONS

– El-cheapo included PSU
– HDD racks non-removable
– Wimpy door on front ports

 

Our great thanks to Fong Kai USA for the FK-330 case samples and for their information support.

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